This was really interesting, but I disagree about electronic voting, I'm by no means an expert, but I think there's a few things you may have missed. The biggest problem is the scalability of potential attacks. With the current system, any attempt to manipulate/cheat the vote is done on a small scale, either a single voting center or constituency, it would require a very large co-ordinated effort to work on a national scale, and the number of people involved would likely lead to it being found out and prevented. However, if there were electronic voting, since there is no such thing as a perfect system, when, not if, a vulnerability is found, it could be replicated across the entire system, and instead of impacting a single MP's position, you could rig the entire election. is it worth that risk? On your point about blockchain, it couldn't be used (at least not in the way you described) as it breaks the rule of anonymity, if there is any way to find out who someone voted for then it means people can be blackmailed/threatened to vote a certain way. with the current system if you sign or identify yourself any other way, then you vote is marked as spoilt, and is not counted. There needs to be blind trust in the system, if you are able to check your vote, it's not blind, and good luck trying to explain to the general public why they should trust blockchain. Again, I'm not an expert, if I'm wrong then please tell me, I wish electronic voting existed, I just don't think it's possible.
All good points and i'm not sure what the solution is. I guess it depends on which is the most reliable way of understanding what a country wants, not trying to create a bullet proof solution which is probably impossible.
This was really interesting, but I disagree about electronic voting, I'm by no means an expert, but I think there's a few things you may have missed.
The biggest problem is the scalability of potential attacks. With the current system, any attempt to manipulate/cheat the vote is done on a small scale, either a single voting center or constituency, it would require a very large co-ordinated effort to work on a national scale, and the number of people involved would likely lead to it being found out and prevented.
However, if there were electronic voting, since there is no such thing as a perfect system, when, not if, a vulnerability is found, it could be replicated across the entire system, and instead of impacting a single MP's position, you could rig the entire election. is it worth that risk?
On your point about blockchain, it couldn't be used (at least not in the way you described) as it breaks the rule of anonymity, if there is any way to find out who someone voted for then it means people can be blackmailed/threatened to vote a certain way. with the current system if you sign or identify yourself any other way, then you vote is marked as spoilt, and is not counted.
There needs to be blind trust in the system, if you are able to check your vote, it's not blind, and good luck trying to explain to the general public why they should trust blockchain.
Again, I'm not an expert, if I'm wrong then please tell me, I wish electronic voting existed, I just don't think it's possible.
All good points and i'm not sure what the solution is. I guess it depends on which is the most reliable way of understanding what a country wants, not trying to create a bullet proof solution which is probably impossible.